Other Takes on the Stuff That Dreams are Made of

     

The movie version we all remember and treasure.

More than a decade ago ago, I was getting ready for bed.  It was late.  I was idly flipping through channels while finishing a late-night snack.  Then there it was.  On Turner Classic Movies (TCM)—The Maltese Falcon.  And I caught it only minutes after the opening credits rolled.  I was hooked.  John Huston’s 1941 directorial debut is one of those films you can watch over and over and it is fresh every time.  So, I watched.  Who needs sleep?

Then in the wee small hours, after Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade delivers the classic closing line to Ward Bond’s befuddled detective, “That’s the stuff that dreams are made of,” before I can finally pack it in I discover that next up was the odd Warner Bros. 1936 remake of a still earlier version, Satan Met a Lady.  I had never seen it.  Well, I wanted to see the sun rise anyway.

The Maltese Falcon originated as a serial in the pulp pages of a lurid magazine—The Black Mask.  It was penned by their most noted writer, Dashiell Hammett, a hard drinking former Pinkerton agent who had made a name for himself creating a nameless detective known as The Continental Op.  In the process he was re-inventing the mystery story into something much grittier.  Eventually it would be called the hard-boiled detective genre.  Out with the drawing rooms and genteel murders and in with the gritty streets, betrayal, flawed heroes, and brassy dames.

                                       

                                                        The pulp serial was issued as a novel in 1930.

In 1930 the serial was issued as a stand-alone novel.  It immediately elevated Hammett to the topflight of popular novelists, even though he would be moldering in his gin-soaked grave before it would be acknowledged as an American literary classic.

His character, Sam Spade, was a departure from the faceless operative of a giant corporation.  He was, like Sherlock Holmes, a consulting detective.  But unlike Holmes his motives were purely pecuniary, his ethics iffy, and his methods by turns trading in betrayal and brutality.  In an uneasy partnership with Miles Archer, he operates a shady agency in a seedy part of town specializing in divorce, scandal, and perhaps a tad of strong-arm enforcement on the side.  His relationship with the police and authorities is  strained at best, although he has allies—most likely drinking buddies or former associates from an implied past.  Despite his general amorality Spade does have a rough personal and professional code which compels him to solve the murder of a feckless partner who he mistrusted and whose wife he was poking on the side despite any risks or temptations

The character and the lurid story, swirling madly around a McGuffin—in this case a fabulous gold and jeweled statuette known as the Maltese Falcon—were a natural for the new sound movies which could make the most out of tough, snappy dialog which Hammett delivered in, you should pardon the expression, spades.  Warner Bros., which was already distinguishing itself from other studios by its willingness to exploit crime and a little sex, gobbled up the rights.

By the way, there really was a Maltese Falcon, as described in the book and ’41 movie.  There really was an annual tribute of “one falcon” paid by the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V for bestowing the fiefdoms of Malta, Tripoli, and Gozo on them.  Known as the Maltese Tribute it was paid annually to Charles and his heirs for centuries—always as an actual bird, however.  No golden, jewel encrusted bird was ever sent and then lost to antiquity.

Ricardo Cortez and Bebe Danniels  as Sam Spade and Ruth Wonderley in in the 1931 Warner Bros. version.  The pre-code film was racy and a scene where Spade strip searches Wonderley made the Production Code Hayes office block a re-release.

Warners’s first stab at a movie looks like a dud when viewed today.  The camera work, dictated by the cumbersome and noisy Vidaphone process camera which had to be encased in a booth, is static.  The pacing drags.  The acting will win no awards.  Bebe Danniels as the temptress Ruth Wonderly gets top billing.  But the action and most of the dialog revolve around Ricardo Cortez as Spade.  Despite the Latin name, Cortez was a handsome, fast-talking New York Jew who was a hold-over silent leading man.  After early success in talkies, his career faded and he was relegated to playing mostly heavies in B movies.  The ubiquitous Una Merkel enlivened the proceedings as Spades loyal secretary and implied plaything.

Whatever its deficiencies to modern viewers, the film was a hit with audiences.  A few years later when Hammet was even a bigger name and rival MGM began producing the Thin Man movies, Warner’s tried to re-release The Maltese Falcon.  But the Motion Picture Code had come into play since the earlier release.  Code authorities refused to allow the release citing several sexually suggestive sequences—including a strip search of Wonderly by Spade and an acknowledgement of a homosexual relationship between villain Casper Gutman and his youthful stooge Wilmer Cook.

Instead, the studio settled on a remake.  But they felt that they had to even change the title to avoid a preemptive block by the Code Authority.  Thus, Satan Met a Lady was born.

The plot and much of the dialog remain, but the names of all of the characters are changed and the McGuffin this time is the supposedly jewel filled Horn of Roland based on a reference in the Medieval French epic the Song of Roland.  But for those of us steeped in the Bogart classic this is Bizzaro World.  To begin with, it’s a comedy.  Let that sink in.

Bette Davis got top billing but Warren William did most of the heavy lifting in a thinly veiled re-make.  To cash in on the popularity of MGM's Thin Man series, also based on work by Dashiell Hammet, the oddly cast film was played for comedy.

Warner’s reigning queen Bette Davis gets top billing.  But she has remarkably little to do but bat those famous eyes and play the temptress.  She is on screen for less than a quarter of the film.  This was just the kind of throwaway role that had her at constant odds with Jack Warner.  The real star is Warren William as detective Ted Shane. 

William was another Warner’s pre-code leading man.  Tall, handsome, glib and middle aged, he specialized in playing amoral businessmen and bosses in films like Skyscraper Souls, The Match King, and Employees Entrance.  He played the sort of a cad that women adored anyway.  His most memorable turn for modern audiences was as the prudish older brother of Dick Powell in Golddiggers of 1933.  By the time this movie was made he had carved out a reliable niche as the fast talking, close-to-the-line super-lawyer Perry Mason in a series of Warner’s programmers.  By the way, for those who grew up on Raymond Burr’s sort of stuffy and stodgy TV version, William is a revelation.

William’s Shane is basically Mason on steroids.  Glib and without an apparent ethical bone in his body, William plays it to the hilt while wearing, for some unknown reason, a black Stetson cowboy hat instead of a private eye snap-brim fedora.

But what really gives the film a house of mirrors feeling is the casting of supporting characters.  Villain #1, Joel Cairo as played by diminutive Peter Lorre five years later, here is lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher of all people as Anthony Travers.  Villain #2 vividly remembered for the film debut of Sydney Greenstreet as Casper Gutman is here grandmotherly Alison Skipworth as Madame Barabas.  And the teenage gunsel played by Elijah Cook Jr.  here is an over-sized oaf in a beret played by Maynard Holmes.  A very young Marie Wilson doing her best Gracie Allen cum Jean Harlow ditzy blonde is a delight as Miss Murgatroyd, Shane’s semi-loyal secretary.

Lanky Englishman Arthur Treacher took time off from playing butlers to play a heavy, the film's equivalent of Peter Lorre's Joel Cairo three years later.  William sported a black Stetson for reason's never made clear.

Yes, this remake was an odd film.  It makes nobody’s list of classics and Davis considered it the nadir of her career at Warners.  But I have to admit, it was kind of fun.  I bet if I had watched it with the aid of a little pot, like I used to watch late-late movies on my little black-and-white portable TV years ago, I bet it would have been hilarious.

But it won’t make me forget the delicious perfection of watching Bogie tell Mary Astor that he is “sending her over” because he “won’t play sap for you like those other guys did.”

Allan Pinkerton— The Spy Master, Original Private Eye, and Union Buster

 

                 Allan Pinkerton in 1861 as he gained fame a Lincoln's protector and secret agent.

Allan Pinkerton, America’s first detective and the founder of the security company that still bears his name was born on August 25, 1819 in Glasgow, Scotland.  Admired as a hero by some, he was despised by generations of workers as a union buster and scab herder. 

Pinkerton started as a class conscious working man.  The son of a duty disabled policeman, he apprenticed as a cooper and participated in the Chartist movement to obtain the franchise for working men and other political reforms.  Chartist “riots” were violently suppressed by troops in many cities. 

Newly married and deeply disappointed by the failure to achieve the vote, Pinkerton decided to immigrate to the Canada at the age of 23 in 1842.  He and his wife were shipwrecked off Nova Scotia and came ashore penniless with only the clothes on their back.  A friend tipped him off to a job at a Chicago brewery.  He worked at his trade there for five years before relocating to rural Dundee, Illinois nearly fifty miles northwest of the city. 

He apparently wanted to go into business providing oak wood from the abundant local woodlots to the brewery but reportedly accidentally stumbled on a ring of counterfeiters, which he reported to local authorities.  In those days when each bank issued their own paper notes, counterfeiting was a common crime.  Several well organized gangs found the remote farmsteads of recently settled Kane and McHenry Counties—good places to set up operations far away from police but close enough to the city to get their bad paper quickly into circulation. 

Pinkerton began using disguises, false identities and other tricks to track down counterfeiting gangs.  He was appointed a part time deputy sheriff and later began to work on contract for the banks whose notes were being counterfeited.  Pinkerton thought he had found a niche and a home. 

But he also supported the Underground Railway which used the rural area as a transportation path for the same reasons as it was chosen by the crooks.  His known abolitionist sentiments led to a crushing electoral defeat in a run for local office. 

But his daring exploits chasing counterfeiters had been picked up in the popular press.  He packed up his new reputation and returned to Chicago where he hired himself out as a freelance detective.  Among his customers were the Treasury Department in the pursuit of more counterfeiters and the Cook County Sheriff, who hired him to locate two girls who had been kidnapped and taken to Michigan.  He found the girls and shot one of the captors, making headlines for his daring do. 

The Sheriff hired him as a full time detective—the first such officer in any Illinois police agency.  He also continued to take private clients on the side. 

 

                            Pinkerton's "seeing eye" became one of America's first and most recognizable company logos. 

In 1855 he formed his own private agency, the North-Western Police Agency, soon to become The Pinkerton National Detective Agency. Its famous logo was an All Seeing Eye with the motto “We never sleep”—thus the origin of the term private eye.  Pinkerton quickly built a large operation with many operatives who were trained in surveillance and under-cover operations.  He demanded his operatives keep detailed records of their cases and on all known criminals they encountered.  He kept the records, including descriptions, aliases, known associates, and modes of operation of hundreds of criminals.  He even became the first to use photographs to identify suspects.  No other private enforcement agency and few public ones had anything like the manpower or sophistication of Pinkerton’s operations.

 Among the frequent customers of the new agency were the railroads, which is how Pinkerton came to the attention of a railroad lawyer and politician, named Abraham Lincoln.  Pinkerton’s steadfast support of the Republican Party didn’t hurt either.  Lincoln tapped Pinkerton to assist his personal friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon for security as he made his way from Illinois to Washington for his inauguration.  Pinkerton operatives uncovered a plot by Confederate sympathizers to kill Lincoln as he changed trains in Baltimore and allegedly foiled the attempt by sneaking the lanky Lincoln through town disguised as an old woman.  

 

Pinkerton, rear with Lincoln's friend and bodyguard Ward Hill Lamon with the goatee escorted President elect Lincoln on his perilous journey by train for the 1861 inauguration. 

As the Civil War erupted, Lincoln learned to his chagrin that the Army had no real intelligence service.  He tapped Pinkerton to become the first head of the new Intelligence Service, forerunner of the U.S. Secret Service.  Pinkerton deployed his operatives behind the lines, often disguised as Confederate soldiers and employed various tipsters.  He personally went on some missions in enemy territory using the name Major E.J. Allen.  He was very close to another old acquaintance from the Illinois Central Railroad, General George McClellan. 

Unfortunately, Pinkerton consistently overestimated the size of opposing Confederate forces by as much two times their actual numbers.  That caused the cautious McClellan to avoid battle with the main Confederate forces when possible while demanding ever more men and arms for the President.  Military historians agree now that had McClellan moved his vastly larger and better equipped army more quickly and with greater determination to follow up on successes, the war could have been significantly shorter.  

 

Pinkerton on horseback in George McClellan's headquarters provided disastrous over-estimates of Confederate numbers and strength which caused the cautious commanding general from taking decisive action. 

Eventually Lincoln grew tired of both McClellan’s dithering and Pinkerton’s exaggerations.  Pinkerton left the Service after 1862, but his agency continued to contract with the government for numerous intelligence operations throughout the rest of the war. 

In post-war years Pinkerton’s agencies pursued gangs of bank and train robbers, most notoriously Missouri outlaws Frank and Jesse James.  The Pinkerton Agency got a public black eye when its men threw a bomb killing a child and blowing the arm off the James boys’ stepmother.  After an operative who got a job working on an adjacent farm was discovered and killed, Pinkerton withdrew from the case.  He considered it the biggest failure of his career. 

 

Pinkerton range detectives like these played a bloody roll in range wars between Western cattle barons and small ranchers and homesteaders accused of rustling cattle. 

Soon rapid post war industrialization led to growing labor unrest.  Pinkerton, the former Chartist, had no trouble enlisting his men as strike breakers and spies against unions.  One of the most famous early examples was the infiltration of the Molly McGuires, a secret organization of Irish miners in the Pennsylvania anthracite coal fields by Irish-born operative James McParland.  Identities of Molly leaders and members were passed to local employers who employed vigilantes, who may or may not have included other Pinkerton men, to ambush and kill them and their families.  McParland’s testimony in court also led to the execution of six men and the destruction of the Molly McGuires.  

 

 Pinkerton detective James McParland infiltrated the Molly Maguires in the Pennsylvania coal fields sending several to the gallows.  He had a long career with the agency and years later arranged for Big Bill Haywood and Charles Moyers of the Western Federation of Miners to be kidnapped from Colorado to stand trial in Idaho on bogus charges of planting a bomb that killed a former governor.

McParland was rewarded with rapid promotion through the company ranks and specialized in labor cases.  Twenty years later he kidnapped Big Bill Haywood, Charles Moyers and other leaders of the Western Federation of Miners from Colorado and took them on a sealed train to Idaho where they were put on trial for the bombing murder of a former governor.  

 

                                    Pinkerton in a Harper's Weekly illustration shortly before his death. 

Pinkerton died in Chicago on July 1, 1884 at the age of 64.  He fell on the pavement and bit his tongue.  It became infected and he died in agony.

 By that time a huge amount of his company’s business was anti-union activity.  Company agents were involved in the gun battle with striking steel workers during the Homestead Strike of 1891, suppressing the Pullman Strike of 1894, and in the infamous Ludlow Massacre of 1914 to list only a few of the most infamous cases. 

The agency also was hired by foreign governments to suppress local radicals, most famously by Spain to work against nationalists in Cuba who included the abolition of slavery as one of their top goals.

Dashiell Hammett became a young Pinkerton operative before World War I and became so disillusioned by the anti-union work he was called on to do, including work that may have led up to the lynching of Industrial Workers of the Word (IWW) organizer Frank Little in Butte, Montana, that the famous creator of hard-boiled detective fiction dedicated much of the rest of his life to supporting radical causes.  

 

 Dashiell Hammett, the inventor of tough guy detective fiction based his character the Continental Op on his experience as a labor spy in Butte, Montana.  He may have been involved in investigations that lead to the lynching of legendary IWW organizer Frank Little.  The bitter experience made him a life-long radical.

In the 1930’s a Senate Committee led by Wisconsin Progressive/Republican Robert M. La Follette, Jr. investigated the Pinkerton Agency for its systematic use of spies to infiltrate labor unions.  To this day Pinkerton is a curse word to unionists and the company is still used to protect scabs and harass picket lines. 

In 1999 the Pinkerton Agency and was acquired by the Swedish based international security firm Securitas AB.  It merged with its chief rival, the William J. Burns Detective Agency, in 2001.  Today it operates as an American subsidy of the Swedish firm under the name Pinkerton Consulting and Investigations.  And the work goes on.